Distributive Justice

The economic framework that each society has — its laws,
institutions, policies, etc. — results in different
distributions of economic benefits and burdens across members of the
society. These economic frameworks are the result of human political
processes and they constantly change both across societies and within
societies over time. The structure of these frameworks is important
because the economic distributions resulting from them fundamentally
affect people's lives. Arguments about which frameworks and/or
resulting distributions are morally preferable constitute the topic of
distributive justice. Principles of distributive justice are therefore
best thought of as providing moral guidance for the political
processes and structures that affect the distribution of economic
benefits and burdens in societies.

This entry is structured in the following way. After outlining the
scope of the entry and the role of distributive principles, the first
relatively simple principle of distributive justice examined is Strict
Egalitarianism, which calls for the allocation of equal material goods
to all members of society. John Rawls' alternative distributive
principle, which he calls the Difference Principle, is examined
next. The Difference Principle permits diverging from strict equality
so long as the inequalities in question would make the least
advantaged in society materially better off than they would be under
strict equality. Some have thought that neither strict equality nor
Rawls' Difference Principle capture the important moral roles of luck
and responsibility in economic life. The “Luck
Egalitarianism” literature comprises varying attempts to design
distributive principles that are appropriately sensitive to
considerations of responsibility and luck in economic
life. Desert-based principles similarly emphasize the moral roles of
responsibility and luck but are distinct because they approach these
factors through claims about what people deserve because of their
work.

Advocates of welfare-based principles (of which utilitarianism is the
most famous) do not believe the primary distributive concern should be
material goods and services. They argue that material goods and
services have no intrinsic value but are valuable only in so far as
they increase welfare. Hence, they argue, distributive principles
should be designed and assessed according to how they affect welfare,
either its maximization or distribution. Advocates of libertarian
principles, by contrast to each of the principles so far mentioned,
generally criticize any distributive ideal that requires the pursuit
of economic ‘patterns’, such as maximization or equality
of welfare or of material goods. They argue that the pursuit of such
patterns conflicts with the more important moral demands of liberty or
self-ownership. Finally, feminist critiques of existing distributive
principles note that they tend to ignore the particular circumstances
of women, so feminists tend to argue for principles which are more
sensitive to facts such as that women often have primary
responsibility for child-rearing and on average, spend less of their
lifetimes than men in the market economy.

Distributive principles vary in numerous dimensions. They vary in what
is considered relevant to distributive justice (income, wealth,
opportunities, jobs, welfare, utility, etc.); in the nature of the
recipients of the distribution (individual persons, groups of persons,
reference classes, etc.); and on what basis the distribution should be
made (equality, maximization, according to individual characteristics,
according to free transactions, etc.). In this entry, the focus is on
principles designed to cover the distribution of benefits and burdens
of economic activity among individuals in a society. Although
principles of this kind have been the dominant source of
Anglo-American debate about distributive justice over the last five
decades, there are other important distributive justice questions,
some of which are covered by other entries in the encyclopedia. These
include questions of distributive justice at the global level rather
than just at the national level (see
justice: international),
distributive justice across generations (see
justice: intergenerational)
and how the topic of distributive justice can be approached, not as a
set of principles but as a virtue (see
justice: as a virtue).

Although the numerous distributive principles vary along different
dimensions, for simplicity, they are presented here in broad
categories. Even though these are common classifications in the
literature, it is important to keep in mind they necessarily involve
over-simplification, particularly with respect to the criticisms of each
of the groups of principles. Some criticisms may not apply equally to
every principle in the group. The issue of how we are to understand
and respond to criticisms of distributive principles is discussed
briefly in the final section on methodology (see
Methodology).

Throughout most of history, people were born into, and largely stayed
in, a fairly rigid economic position. The distribution of economic
benefits and burdens was normally seen as fixed, either by nature or
by God. Only when there was a widespread realization that the
distribution of economic benefits and burdens could be affected by
government did distributive justice become a live topic. Now the topic
is unavoidable. Governments continuously make and change laws and
policies affecting the distribution of economic benefits and burdens
in their societies. Almost all changes, whether they regard tax,
industry, education, health, etc. have distributive effects. As a
result, every society has a different distribution at any point in
time and we are becoming increasingly more adept at measuring that
distribution. More importantly, at every point in time now, each
society is faced with a choice about whether to stay with current
laws, policies, etc. or to modify them. The practical contribution of
distributive justice theory is to provide moral guidance for these
constant choices.

Partly because many writers on distributive justice tend to advocate
their particular principles by describing or considering ideal
societies operating under them, some readers may be misled to believe
that discussions of distributive justice are merely exercises in ideal
theory. This is unfortunate because, in the end, distributive justice
theory is a practical enterprise. It is important to acknowledge that
there has never been, and never will be, a purely libertarian society
or Rawlsian society, or any society whose distribution conforms to one
of the proposed principles, so rather than guiding ideal societies,
distributive principles provide moral guidance for the choices that
each society faces now and every year. So, for instance, advocates of
Rawls' Difference Principle are arguing that we should change our
institutions to improve the life prospects of the least advantaged in
society. Others are arguing for changes to bring economic benefits and
burdens more in accordance with what people deserve. Libertarians are
arguing that reductions in government intervention in the economy will
better respect liberty and/or self-ownership of its
citizens. Sometimes a number of the theories will recommend the same
changes; other times they will diverge.

Another popular misconception about distributive justice is that it is
readily avoidable by the population and/or governments. This reveals a
confusion about the nature of the choices always facing each
society. To claim that we should not pursue any changes to our
economic structures in light of a distributive justice argument is, by
its very nature, to take a stand on the distributive justice of (or,
if one prefers, the ‘morality’ of) the current
distribution and structures in the society compared to any of the
possible alternative distributions and structures practically
available. At any particular moment the current economic framework is
fundamentally affecting the economic and life prospects of everybody
in the society. To assert that we should not change the current system
is to take a substantive moral stance on that distribution — it is to
say that it is morally preferable to any practical alternative
proposed. The ‘should’ here has to be a moral should and
if it is to be anything other than a bald assertion then the only type
of argument that can back it up is one within the broad distributive
justice tradition (which includes principles which do not use
‘justice’ per se, such as utilitarianism, but which are
moral principles relating to distribution just the same). So societies
cannot avoid taking positions about distributive justice.

A related point can be made when people assert that economic
structures and policy should be left to economists, or when people
assert that economic policy can be pursued without reference to
distributive justice. These assertions reveal misconceptions about
what distributive justice and economics are, and how they are
related. Positive economics, at its best, can tell us about economic
causes and effects. Positive economics is very important for
distributive justice because it can give us guidance about which
changes to pursue in order to better instantiate our moral
principles. What it cannot do, in the absence of the principles, is
tell us what we should do. This point is easily lost in everyday
political discussion. When an economist says ‘The Central Bank
should raise interest rates’ the general population often
mistakenly believes the recommendation is purely coming from the
science of economics. It is not. Moreover the ‘should’ is
almost always a moral ‘should’. When economists make such
a recommendation, they, sometimes unconsciously, have taken off their
social scientific hat. They are employing alongside their positive
economic theory, a moral principle. Often the moral evaluation being
employed is not that controversial but suppressing that there are
always moral arguments at play has had the effect of creating
misconceptions about the role of distributive justice arguments in
economic decision-making.

For instance, the raising of interest rates is typically thought by
economists to have the dual effects of reducing inflation and reducing
employment from what they otherwise would be. Other things being
equal, most people think that reducing inflation is morally good and
reducing employment is morally bad (it makes more people unemployed or
underemployed). To get to a recommendation that the Central Bank
should reduce interest rates involves not only empirical views about
the relative sizes of the inflation and unemployment effects and their
long-term impact on growth, etc. but also normative views about the
relative moral importance of inflation, employment and growth. For
economists, these normative views on economic policies come under the
rubric of ‘normative’ economics, while philosophers would
typically categorize them under ‘distributive
justice’. But the rubrics are not important as basically the
same area is covered under different names — the normative evaluation
of economic policies/structure/institutions. The evaluations often
look different because economists most commonly use utility as their
fundamental moral concept while philosophers use a wider variety of
moral concepts, but the task in which they are both engaged is the
same. What is most important to understand here is that positive
economics alone cannot, without the guidance of normative principles,
recommend which policies/structures/institutions to pursue. The
arguments and principles discussed in what follows aim to supply this kind of
normative guidance.

One of the simplest principles of distributive justice is that of
strict, or radical, equality. The principle says that every person should
have the same level of material goods and services. The principle is
most commonly justified on the grounds that people are morally equal
and that equality in material goods and services is the best
way to give effect to this moral ideal.

Even with this ostensibly simple principle some of the difficult
specification problems of distributive principles can be seen. The two
main problems are the construction of appropriate indices for
measurement (the index problem), and the specification of time frames.
Because there are numerous proposed solutions to these problems, the
‘principle of strict equality’ is not a single principle
but a name for a group of closely related principles. This range of
possible specifications occurs with all the common principles of
distributive justice.

The index problem arises primarily because the goods to be
distributed need to be measured if they are going to be distributed
according to some pattern (such as equality). The strict equality
principle stated above says that there should be ‘the same
level of material goods and services’. The problem is
how to specify and measure levels. One way of solving the index
problem in the strict equality case is to specify that everyone should
have the same bundle of material goods and services rather
than the same level (so everyone would have 4 oranges, 6
apples, 1 bike, etc.). The main objection to this solution is that it
appears likely that there will be many other allocations of material
goods and services which will make some people better off without
making anybody else worse off. Such allocations are what are called
‘Pareto superior’ allocations
(see equality for a more detailed
discussion of Pareto efficiency). For instance, someone who prefers
apples to oranges will be better off if she swaps some of her oranges
for some of the apples belonging to a person who prefers oranges. That
way, they are both better off and no one is worse off. Indeed, since
most everyone will wish to trade something, requiring identical
bundles will make virtually everybody materially worse off than they
would be under an alternative allocation. So specifying that everybody
must have the same bundle of goods does not seem to be a
satisfactory way of solving the index problem. Some index for
measuring the value of goods and services is required.

Money is an index for the value of material goods and services. It is
an imperfect index whose pitfalls are documented in most economics
textbooks. Moreover, once the goods to be allocated are extended
beyond material ones to include goods such as opportunities, money
must be combined with other indices. (For instance, John Rawls' index
of primary goods — see Rawls 1971.) Nevertheless, using money,
either in the form of income or wealth or both, as an index for the
value of material goods and services is the most common response so
far suggested to the index problem and is widely used in the
specification and implementation of distributive principles.

The second main specification problem involves time frames. Many
distributive principles identify and require that a particular pattern
of distribution be achieved or at least aimed at. But they also need to specify
when the pattern is required. One version of the principle of
strict equality requires that all people should have the same wealth
at some initial point, after which people are free to use their wealth
in whatever way they choose, with the consequence that future outcomes
are bound to be unequal. Principles specifying initial distributions
after which the pattern need not be preserved are commonly called
‘starting-gate’ principles. (See Ackerman 1980,
53–59,168–170,180–186; Alstott and Ackerman 1999.)

Because ‘starting-gate’ principles may eventually lead to
large inequalities, strict egalitarians do not usually favor them. The
most common form of strict equality principle specifies
that income (measured in terms of money) should be equal
in each time-frame, though even this may lead to significant
disparities in wealth if variations in savings are permitted. Hence,
strict equality principles are commonly conjoined with some
society-wide specification of just saving behavior (see
justice: intergenerational).
In practice, however, this principle and the
starting-gate version might require more similar distributions than it
first appears. This is because the structure of the family means the
requirement to give people equal starts will often necessitate
redistribution to parents, who due to bad luck, bad management, or
simply their own choices, have been unsuccessful in accruing or
holding onto material goods.

There are a number of direct moral criticisms made of strict equality
principles: that they unduly restrict freedom, that they do not give
best effect to the moral equality of persons, that they conflict with
what people deserve, etc. (see the sections on
Libertarian Principles, and
Desert-Based Principles, and the
entry on
equality).
But the most common criticism is a welfare-based one
related to the Pareto efficiency requirement: that everyone can be
materially better off if incomes are not strictly equal (Carens 1981).
It is this criticism which partly inspired the Difference
Principle.

The wealth of an economy is not a fixed amount from one period to the
next. More wealth can be produced and indeed this has been the
overwhelming feature of industrialized countries over the last couple
of centuries. The dominant economic view is that wealth is
most readily increased in systems where those who are more productive
earn greater incomes. This economic view partly inspired the
formulation of the Difference Principle.

The most widely discussed theory of distributive justice in the past
four decades has been that proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of
Justice, (Rawls 1971), and Political Liberalism, (Rawls
1993). Rawls proposes the following two principles of justice:

1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate
scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible
with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political
liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair
value.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:
(a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under
conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to
the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls
1993, pp. 5–6. The principles are numbered as they were in Rawls'
original A Theory of Justice.)

For (2b) Rawls uses an ‘index of primary goods’ to measure
the benefits of people for the purposes of the second principle. Where
the rules may conflict in practice, Rawls says that Principle (1) has
lexical priority over Principle (2), and Principle (2a) has lexical
priority over (2b). As a consequence of the priority rules, Rawls'
principles do not permit sacrifices to basic liberties in order to
generate greater equality of opportunity or a higher level of material
goods, even for the worst off. While it is possible to think of
Principle (1) as governing the distribution of liberties, it is not
commonly considered a principle of distributive justice given that it
is not governing the distribution of economic goods per
se. Equality of opportunity is discussed in the next section. In
this section, the primary focus will be on (2b), known as the
Difference Principle.

The main moral motivation for the Difference Principle is similar to
that for strict equality: equal respect for persons. Indeed the
Difference Principle materially collapses to a form of strict equality
under empirical conditions where differences in income have no effect
on the work incentive of people. The overwhelming economic opinion though is
that in the foreseeable future the possibility of earning greater
income will bring forth greater productive effort. This will increase
the total wealth of the economy and, under the Difference Principle,
the wealth of the least advantaged. Opinion divides on the size of the
inequalities which would, as a matter of empirical fact, be allowed by
the Difference Principle, and on how much better off the least
advantaged would be under the Difference Principle than under a strict
equality principle. Rawls' principle however gives fairly clear
guidance on what type of arguments will count as justifications for
inequality. Rawls is not opposed in principle to a system of strict equality
per se; his concern is about the absolute position of
the least advantaged group rather than their relative
position. If a system of strict equality maximizes the absolute
position of the least advantaged in society, then the Difference
Principle advocates strict equality. If it is possible to raise the
absolute position of the least advantaged further by having some
inequalities of income and wealth, then the Difference Principle
prescribes inequality up to that point where the absolute position of
the least advantaged can no longer be raised.

Because there has been such extensive discussion of the Difference
Principle in the last 40 years, there have been numerous criticisms of
it from the perspective of all the other theories of distributive
justice outlined here. Briefly, the main criticisms are as follows.

Advocates of strict equality argue that inequalities permitted by the
Difference Principle are unacceptable even if they do benefit the
absolute position of the least advantaged. The problem for these
advocates has been to explain convincingly why society should be
prevented from materially benefiting the least advantaged when this
benefit requires a deviation from strict equality.

For the strict egalitarian the relative position of
people is all important and the absolute position is either
not important at all or lexically inferior. For Rawls, at least with
respect to the social and economic inequalities, the opposite is
true. But there have been various plausible explanations given in
reply to Rawls' proposed Difference Principle why relative position is
a value that should be weighed against the value of the
absolute position of the least advantaged rather than subordinated
lexically to it. In an early reply to Rawls, Crocker explains the
value of paying attention to the relative position as a way of
understanding the value of solidarity. His approach fits into a set of
views in which being materially equal, or striving towards it, is an
important expression of the equality of persons.

Another set of views, in opposition to Rawls' Difference Principle,
emphasizes the importance of relative position not as a value in
itself but because of its effect on other relations. In particular, if
some people are significantly better off materially than others then
that can result in them having significant power over others. Rawls'
response to this criticism appeals to the priority of his first
principle: The inequalities consistent with the Difference Principle
are only permitted so long as they do not compromise the fair value of
the political liberties. So, for instance, very large wealth
differentials may make it practically impossible for poor people to be
elected to political office or to have their political views
represented. These inequalities of wealth, even if they increase the
material position of the least advantaged group, may need to be
reduced in order for the first principle to be implemented. However,
while this provides a partial reply to Rawls' critics, it does not seem
to recognize that it is not just differential political power that can
come from significant differences in economic position but also
economic power and hence economic freedom. Virtual monopoly employers
in regions of developing economies give a stark illustration of this
phenomenon. Of course, Rawls can appeal in such cases to the empirical
claim that such differentials do not maximize the long-term position
of the least advantaged. The empirical question will be whether all
such large differentials which result in large differences in economic
power also demonstrably have the result of worsening the absolute
position of the least advantaged.

The utilitarian objection to the Difference Principle is that it does
not maximize utility. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls uses
utilitarianism as the main theory for comparison with his own, and
hence he offers a number of arguments in response to this utilitarian
objection, some of which are outlined in the section on
Welfare-Based Principles.

Libertarians object that the Difference Principle involves
unacceptable infringements on liberty, property rights, or
self-ownership. For instance, the Difference Principle may require
redistributive taxation for the benefit of the poor, and libertarians
commonly object that such taxation involves the immoral taking of just
holdings (see
Libertarian Principles).

The Difference Principle is also criticized as a primary distributive
principle on the grounds that it mostly ignores claims that
people deserve certain economic benefits in light of their
actions. Advocates of desert-based principles argue that some may
deserve a higher level of material goods because of their hard work or
contributions even if their unequal rewards do not also function to
improve the position of the least advantaged. Desert theorists as well
as libertarians also argue that the explanation of how
people come to be in more or less advantaged positions is morally
relevant to their fairness, yet the Difference Principle ignores these
explanations.

Like desert theorists, advocates of Luck Egalitarian principles argue
that the Difference Principle does not fully capture the moral roles
they believe luck and responsibility should play in principles of
distributive justice. Indeed,‘ luck egalitarianism’ as a
distinct approach in the distributive justice literature really
developed in critical response to Rawls' theory of distributive
justice. The reasons for that response are outlined in the next
section.

The distribution of material goods and services is not the only
economic distribution which is important to people. The distribution
of opportunities is also important. As noted in the previous section,
John Rawls conjoined his Difference Principle with a principle of
equality of opportunity. Endorsement of some form of equality of
opportunity is very prevalent among distributive justice theorists
and, indeed, among the general population, especially when combined
with some form of market distributive mechanism. Equality of
opportunity is often contrasted favorably with ‘equality of
outcome’ or strict egalitarianism, by those who believe that we
can show equal concern, respect, or treatment of people without them
having the same material goods and services, so long as they have
equal economic opportunities. What is the morally best interpretation
of this equality of opportunity principle has been a significant focus
of research, particularly among luck egalitarians.

In 1988, Brian Barry gave an interesting reconstruction of the
reasoning which led John Rawls to his Equal Opportunity and Difference
Principles. Barry's reconstruction and Ronald Dworkin's earlier
discussion (which we will come to later), have been seminal in the
luck egalitarian literature. A version of this argument is probably
the best introduction to some of the relevant moral issues.

‘Formal’ equality of opportunity rules out formal
discrimination on grounds such as a person's race, ethnicity, age or
gender. What is the underlying concern, shared by most theorists and
the general population, with a society lacking formal equality of
opportunity? The concern seems to be rooted in the belief that traits
such as a persons' gender or race are elements over which people have
no control and, hence, a society in which people's race or gender have
fundamental effects on their lifetime economic prospects treats people
unfairly. In such societies, whether people were born as the favored
gender or race, and hence were favored economically, would simply be a
matter of luck. Rawls' claim is that structuring a society so that
this ‘natural lottery’ has such fundamental effects on
people's lives is immoral, when we have the option to structure it
another way, with a system of formal equality of opportunity.

The foregoing is relatively uncontroversial, but what made Rawls' (and
Barry's) arguments so interesting was their claim that this line of
reasoning actually leads to much stronger requirements for social
justice. They note that even with formal equality of opportunity,
there will remain many factors over which people have no control but
which will affect their lifetime economic prospects, such as whether a
person's family can afford to purchase good quality educational
opportunities or health care. A society therefore will have reasons to
adopt a more substantial equality of opportunity principle, with equal
opportunities for education, health care, etc. — the same
reasons it had for adopting a merely formal equality of opportunity
principle.

Following this line of reasoning further (and it certainly has
appeared to many that we have no principled reason to stop here) seems
to lead to more radical conclusions than those who agreed with formal
equality of opportunity would have imagined. A society with a more
substantial equality of opportunity principle in place will still not
be providing equality of opportunity for all. People are born into
more or less nurturing families and social circumstances. People are
born into families and neighborhoods which are more or less
encouraging of education and the development of economically
advantageous talents. There are a whole range of social influences
which have fundamental and unequal effects on children's economic
prospects and for which they are in no way responsible — the
influences children are exposed to are a matter of their luck in the
‘social lottery’. Moreover, the luck of the natural
lottery is not just restricted to such characteristics as gender and
race. Children are more or less fortunate in the distribution of
natural talents as well.

A race where the starting line is arbitrarily staggered, where
people's prospects for winning are not largely determined by factors
for which they are responsible but rather largely by luck, is not
considered a fair race. Similarly, if society is structured so that
people's prospects for gaining more economic goods are not largely
determined by factors for which they are responsible but rather
largely by luck, then the society is open to the charge of being
unfair. This is the challenging conclusion with which Barry, following
Rawls, presents us.

In response to this challenge, Barry himself explores a number of
avenues, including questioning whether economic distribution is really
analogous to a race. Rawls, of course, responded to his own challenge
by arguing that there is not a lot that can be done (morally) to make
the social and natural opportunities more equal, so the fair response
is to adopt the Difference Principle. Others, however, have taken this
challenge in different directions.

Ronald Dworkin, (Dworkin 1981a, 1981b, 2000) provided one of the most
detailed early responses to Rawls' challenge. In retrospect, Dworkin's
theory is often identified as one of the earliest in the luck
egalitarian literature, though Dworkin himself called his theory
Resource Egalitarianism. Dworkin presented his key insight (i.e., what
distinguishes him from Rawls) in terms of a distinction between
‘ambitions’ and ‘endowments’. Dworkin uses the
term ‘ambitions’ to cover the realm of our choices and
what results from our choices, such as the choice to work hard, or to
spend money on expensive luxuries. His term ‘endowments’
refers to the results of brute luck, or those things over which we
have no control, such as one's genetic inheritance, or unforeseeable
bad luck. Dworkin agrees with Rawls that natural inequalities are not
distributed according to people's choices, nor are they justified by
reference to some other morally relevant fact about people, so people
should not end up worse off as a result of bad luck in the natural
lottery. However, Dworkin argues the Difference Principle fails to
deliver on this ideal, since its formulation in terms of primary goods
fails to recognize that those who are very unlucky, such as the
severely ill or disabled, may need considerably greater shares of
primary goods than others in order to achieve a reasonable
life. Dworkin also argued that just economic distributions should be
more responsive than the Difference Principle to the consequences of
people's choices.

Dworkin proposed that people begin with equal resources but be allowed
to end up with unequal economic benefits as a result of their own
choices. What constitutes a just material distribution is to be
determined by the result of a thought experiment designed to model
fair distribution. Suppose that everyone is given the same purchasing
power and each uses that purchasing power to bid, in a fair auction,
for resources best suited to their life plans. They are then permitted
to use those resources as they see fit. Although people may end up
with different economic benefits, none of them is given less
consideration than another in the sense that if they wanted somebody
else's resource bundle they could have bid for it instead.

In Dworkin's proposal we see his attitudes to ‘ambitions’
and ‘endowments’ which have become a central feature of
luck egalitarianism (though under a wide variety of alternative names
and further subset-distinctions). In terms of sensitivity to
‘ambitions’, Dworkin and many other luck egalitarians
argue that provided people have an ‘equal’ starting point
(in Dworkin's case, resources) they should live with the consequences
of their choices. They argue, for instance, that people who choose to
work hard to earn more income should not be required to subsidize
those choosing more leisure and hence less income.

With respect to ‘endowments’, Dworkin proposes a hypothetical
compensation scheme in which he supposes that, before the hypothetical
auction described above, people do not know their own natural
endowments. However, they are able to buy insurance against being
disadvantaged in the natural distribution of talents and they know
that their payments will provide an insurance pool to compensate those
people who are unlucky in the ‘natural lottery’.

Dworkin's early proposals were very hypothetical and it was somewhat
difficult to see what they meant in practice. Later luck egalitarians
have tried to tease out the practical implications of their theories
in more detail, though much of the debate still remains at the
theoretical level. They agree with Dworkin's recommendation, against
Rawls' Difference Principle approach, that those with unequal natural
endowments should receive compensation. For instance, people born with
handicaps, or ill-health, who have not brought these circumstances
upon themselves, can be explicitly compensated so that they are not
disadvantaged in their economic prospects. Under Rawls' Difference
Principle, though, no such explicit compensation is forthcoming —
as Rawls says, the Difference Principle is not the principle of
redress (Rawls 1971, 101). Of course, for the subset of people with
long-term handicaps or ill-health who are also in the least advantaged
group (variously defined by Rawls, but most commonly defined as the
lowest socio-economic grouping) the Difference Principle will
help. But the help will not be proportionate to their needs arising
from their handicaps or ill-health.

Luck egalitarians continue to refine such aspects of their theories as
(a) what they believe is the relevant conception of equality of
opportunity, (b) how much of a role luck should play in the
distribution of economic benefits and (c) what is the best conception
of 'luck' (Arneson 1990 and 2001, Fleurbaey 2001, Swift 2008, Sher
2010). Relatedly, they continue to explore what role responsibility
should play in the distribution of economic goods (Sen 1985, Cohen
1997, Valentyne 1997, Knight 2011).

Because the luck egalitarian proposals have a similar motivation to
the Difference Principle the moral criticisms of them tend to be
variations on those leveled against the Difference Principle. However,
as noted above, what is practically required of a society operating
under the Difference Principle is relatively straightforward. How the
theoretical concerns of luck egalitarians are to be practically
implemented is often not so clear. For instance, it has seemed
impossible to measure differences in people's natural talents —
unfortunately, people's talents do not neatly divide into the natural
and those for which people can be held responsible. A system of
special assistance to the physically and mentally handicapped and to
the ill would be a partial implementation of the compensation system,
but most natural inequalities would be left untouched by such
assistance while the theories commonly require compensation for such
inequalities. Exploring how in practical ways the economic systems can
be refined to track responsibility while mitigating certain types of
pure luck will be an ongoing challenge for luck egalitarians.

Welfare-based principles are motivated by the idea that what is of
primary moral importance is the level of welfare of people. Advocates
of welfare-based principles view the concerns of other theories
— material equality, the level of primary goods of the least
advantaged, resources, desert-claims, or liberty — as derivative
concerns. They are only valuable in so far as they affect welfare, so
that all distributive questions should be settled entirely by how the
distribution affects welfare. However, there are many ways that
welfare can be used in answering these distributive questions, so
welfare-theorists need to specify what welfare function they believe
should be maximized. The welfare functions proposed vary according to
what will count as welfare and the weighting system for that
welfare. Economists defending some form of welfarism normally state
the explicit functional form, while philosophers often avoid this
formality, concentrating on developing their theories in answer to two
questions: 1) the question of what has intrinsic value, and 2) the
question of what actions or policies would maximize the intrinsic
value. Moreover, philosophers tend to restrict themselves to a small
subset of the available welfare functions. Although there are a number
of advocates of alternative welfare functions (such as ‘equality
of well-being’), most philosophical activity has concentrated on
a variant known as utilitarianism. This theory can be used to
illustrate most of the main characteristics of welfare-based
principles.

Historically, utilitarians have used the term ‘utility’
rather than ‘welfare’ and utility has been defined
variously as pleasure, happiness, or preference-satisfaction. Jeremy
Bentham, the historical father of utilitarianism, argued that the
experience of pleasure was the only thing with intrinsic value, and
all other things had intstrumental value insofar as they contribute to
the experience of pleasure or the avoidance of pain. His student John
Stuart Mill broadened this theory of intrinsic value to include
happiness, or fulfillment. Modern philosophers since Kenneth Arrow,
though, tend to argue that intrinsic value consists in
preference-satisfaction, i.e. in individuals' having what they
want. So, for instance, the principle for distributing economic
benefits for preference utilitarians is to distribute them so as to
maximize preference-satisfaction. The welfare function for such a
principle has a relatively simple theoretical form which requires
choosing the distribution which maximizes the arithmetic sum of all
satisfied preferences (unsatisfied preferences being negative),
weighted for the intensity of those preferences. To accommodate
uncertainty with respect to outcomes the function can be modified so
that expected utility, rather than utility, is maximized
(see consequentialism).

The basic theory of utilitarianism is one of the simplest to state and
understand. Much of the work on the theory therefore has been directed
towards defending it against moral criticisms, particularly from the
point of view of ‘commonsense’ morality. The criticisms
and responses have been widely discussed in the literature on
utilitarianism as a general moral
theory (see consequentialism). Two
of the most widely discussed criticisms will be mentioned here.

The first, which was famously articulated by John Rawls (1971), is
that utilitarianism fails to take seriously the distinctness of
persons. Maximization of preference-satisfaction is often taken as
prudent in the case of individuals — people may take on greater
burdens, suffering or sacrifice at certain periods of their lives so
that their lives are overall better. The complaint against
utilitarianism is that it takes this principle, commonly described as
prudent for individuals, and uses it on an entity, society, unlike
individuals in important ways. While it may be acceptable for a person
to choose to suffer at some period in her life (be it a day, or a
number of years) so that her overall life is better, it is often
argued against utilitarianism that it is immoral to make some people
suffer so that there is a net gain for other people. In the individual
case, there is a single entity experiencing both the sacrifice and the
gain. Also, the individuals, who suffer or make the sacrifices,
choose to do so in order to gain some benefit they deem worth their
sacrifice. In the case of society as a whole, there is no single
experiential entity — some people suffer or are sacrificed so
that others may gain. Furthermore, under utilitarianism, there is no
requirement for people to consent to the suffering or sacrifice, nor
is there necessarily a unified belief in the society that the outcome
is worth the cost.

A related criticism of utilitarianism involves the way it treats
individual preferences about other peoples' welfare or holdings. For
instance, some people may have a preference that the members of some
minority racial group have less material benefits. Under utilitarian
theories, in their classical form, this preference or interest counts
like any other in determining the best distribution. Hence, if racial
preferences are widespread and are not outweighed by the minority's
contrary preferences (perhaps because the minority is relatively few
in number compared to the majority), utilitarianism will recommend an
inegalitarian distribution based on race if there is not some other
utility-maximizing alternative on offer.

utilitarians have responded to these criticisms in a number of ways.
utilitarians may believe that even more welfare in the long run can be
achieved by re-educating the majority so that racist preferences
weaken or disappear over time, leading to a more harmonious and
happier world. However, the utilitarian must supply an account of why
racist or sexist preferences should be discouraged if the same level
of total long term utility could be achieved by encouraging the less
powerful to be content with a lower position. Utilitarians have
also argued that the empirical conditions are such that utility
maximizing will rarely require racial minorities to sacrifice or
suffer for the benefit of others, or to satisfy the prejudices of
others. But if their theory on rare occasions does require people
sacrifice or suffer in these ways, utilitarians have defended this
unintuitive consequence on the grounds that our judgments about what
is wrong provide us with ‘rules of thumb’ which are useful
at the level of commonsense morality but ultimately mistaken at the
level of ‘critical theory’. More recently, some
utilitarians have drawn on institutional theory or game theory in
defence, or in modification, of utilitarianism (see Hardin 1988,
Goodin 1995, Bailey 1997). Noting that the consequences of individual
actions are rarely determined in isolation, but rather in conjunction
with the actions of many others, these Institutional utilitarians
argue that morally intuitive institutions such as constitutional
rights, human rights and various property rights would be endorsed by
utilitarianism, and would forbid the morally horrible outcomes critics
have feared utilitarianism could sanction.

Utilitarian distribution principles, like the other principles
described here, have problems with specification and implementation.
Most formulations of utilitarianism require interpersonal comparisons
of utility. This means, for instance, that we must be able to compare
the utility one person gains from eating an apple with that another
gains from eating an apple. Furthermore, utilitarianism requires that
differences in utility be measured and summed for widely disparate
goods (so, for instance, the amount of utility a particular person
gains from playing football is measured and compared with the amount
of utility another gains from eating a gourmet meal). Some critics
have argued that such interpersonal utility comparisons are
impossible, even in theory, because even if the already significant
challenge of combining all the diverse goods into a single index of
‘utility’ could be met for an individual, there is no
conceptually adequate way of calibrating such a measure among
individuals (see Elster 1991).

Utilitarians face a greater problem than this theoretical one in
determining what material distribution is prescribed by their theory.
Those who share similar utilitarian theoretical principles frequently
recommend very different material distributions to implement the
principle. This problem occurs for other theories, but appears worse
for utilitarian and welfare-based distribution principles.
Recommendations for distributions or economic structures to implement
other distributive principles commonly vary among advocates with
similar theoretical principles, but the advocates tend to cluster
around particular recommendations. This is not the case for
utilitarianism, with adherents dispersed in their recommendations
across the full range of possible distributions and economic
structures. For instance, many preference utilitarians believe their
principle prescribes strongly egalitarian structures with lots of state
intervention while other preference utilitarians believe it
prescribes a laissez faire style of capitalism.

There is an explanation for why utilitarians are faced with greater
difficulties in implementation. Other distributive principles can rule
out, relatively quickly, some practical policies on the grounds that
they clearly violate the guiding principle, but utilitarians must
examine, in great detail, all the policies on offer. For each policy,
they must determine the distribution of goods and services yielded by
the policy and at least three other factors: the identity of each
person in the distribution (if individuals' utility functions differ);
the utility of each person from the goods and services distributed to
them; the utility of each person from the policy itself. The size of
the information requirements make this task impossible. Hence, broad
assumptions must be made and each different set of assumptions will
yield a different answer, and so the answers range across the full set
of policies on offer. Moreover, there is no obvious way to arbitrate
between the different sets of assumptions. For instance, suppose three
utilitarians agree on the same utilitarian distributive principle.
Utilitarian 1, for example, may assert that the population's utility
function conforms to function A (e.g. people's marginal utility is
linear in the goods and services they consume) and is maximized by
Policy 1; Utilitarian 2, however, asserts that half the population's
utility function conforms to function A and half to function B
(e.g. people's marginal utility is diminishing) and is maximized by
Policy 2; Utilitarian 3, furthermore, asserts Utilitarian 2 is correct
about the utility functions of the population but claims that Policy 3
will maximize utility. What seems impossible for advocates of
utilitarian-distribution principles to answer is how we would
arbitrate these claims. If utilitarian principles are to play a role
in debates about distributive justice then this is the most important
question to answer.

Another complaint against welfarism is that it ignores, and in fact
cannot even make sense of, claims that people deserve certain
economic benefits in light of their actions (Feinberg, Lamont
1997). The complaint is often motivated by the concern that various
forms of welfarism treat people as mere containers for well-being,
rather than purposeful beings, responsible for their actions and
creative in their environments.

The different
desert-based
principles of distribution differ primarily according to what they
identify as the basis for deserving. While Aristotle proposed virtue,
or moral character, to be the best desert-basis for economic
distribution, contemporary desert theorists have proposed desert-bases
that are more practically implemented in complex modern
societies. Most contemporary desert theorists have pursued John
Locke's lead in this respect. Locke argued people deserve to have
those items produced by their toil and industry, the products (or the
value thereof) being a fitting reward for their effort (see Miller
1989). Locke's underlying idea was to guarantee to individuals the
fruits of their own labor and abstinence. Most contemporary proposals
for desert-bases fit into one of three broad categories:

Contribution: People should be rewarded for their work activity
according to the value of their contribution to the social product.
(Miller 1976, Miller 1989, Riley 1989)

Effort: People should be rewarded according to the effort they
expend in their work activity (Sadurski 1985a,b, Milne 1986).

Compensation: People should be rewarded according to the costs they
incur in their work activity (Dick 1975, Lamont 1997).

According to the contemporary desert theorist, people freely apply their
abilities and talents, in varying degrees, to socially productive work.
People come to deserve varying levels of income by providing goods and
services desired by others (Feinberg 1970). Distributive systems are just
insofar as they distribute incomes according to the different levels
earned or deserved by the individuals in the society for their
productive labors, efforts, or contributions.

Contemporary desert-principles all share the value of raising the
standard of living — collectively, ‘the social
product’. Under each principle, only activity directed at
raising the social product will serve as a basis for deserving
income. The concept of desert itself does not yield this value of
raising the social product; it is a value societies hold
independently. Hence, desert principles identifying desert-bases tied
to socially productive activity (productivity, compensation, and
effort all being examples of such bases) do not do so because the
concept of desert requires this. They do so because societies value
higher standards of living, and therefore choose the raising of living
standards as the primary value relevant to desert-based
distribution. This means that the full development of desert-based
principles requires specification (and defense) of those activities
which will or will not count as socially productive, and hence as
deserving of remuneration (Lamont 1994).

It is important to distinguish desert-payments from entitlements. For
desert theorists a well-designed institutional structure will make it
so that many of the entitlements people have are deserved. But
entitlements and just deserts can come apart. As Feinberg notes, a
person can be entitled to assume the presidential office without
deserving it (Feinberg 1970, 86) and a person who accidentally
apprehends a criminal may be entitled to a reward but not deserve
it. Conversely, a team may deserve to win the championship prize but
not entitled to it or a person may deserve an economic benefit but not
be entitled to it. These instances of desert and entitlements coming
apart are typical fertile grounds for a desert theorist to argue for
institutional reform.

Payments designed to give people incentives are a form of entitlement
particularly worth distinguishing from desert-payments as they are
commonly confused (Barry 1965, 111–112). Incentive-payments are
‘forward-looking’ in that they are set up to create a
situation in the future, while desert-payments are
‘backwards-looking’in that they are justified with
reference to work in the present or past. Even though it is possible
for the same payment to be both deserved and an incentive, incentives
and desert provide distinct rationales for income and should not be
conflated (Lamont 1997).

While some have sought to justify current capitalist distributions via
desert-based distributive principles, John Stuart Mill and many since
have forcefully argued the contrary claim — that the
implementation of a productivity principle would involve dramatic
changes in modern market economies and would greatly reduce the
inequalities characteristic of them. It is important to note, though,
that contemporary desert-based principles are rarely complete
distributive principles. They usually are only designed to cover
distribution among working adults, leaving basic welfare needs to be
met by other principles.

The specification and implementation problems for desert-based
distribution principles revolve mainly around the desert-bases: it is
difficult to identify what is to count as a contribution, an effort or
a cost, and it is even more difficult to measure these in a complex
modern economy.

The main moral objection to desert-based principles is that they make
economic benefits depend on factors over which people have little
control. John Rawls has made one of the most widely discussed
arguments to this effect (Rawls 1971), and while the strong form of
this argument has been clearly refuted (Zaitchik, Sher), it remains a
problem for desert-based principles. The problem is most pronounced in
the case of productivity-based principles — a person's
productivity seems clearly to be influenced by many factors over which
the person has little control.

It is interesting to note that under most welfare-based principles,
it is also the case that people's level of economic benefits depends on
factors beyond their control. But welfarists view this as a virtue of
their theory, since they think the only morally relevant characteristic
of any distribution is the welfare resulting from it. Whether the
distribution ties economic benefits to matters beyond our control is
morally irrelevant from the welfarist point of view. (As it happens,
welfarists often hold the empirical claim that people have little
control over their contributions to society anyway.) However, for
people's benefits to depend on factors beyond their control is a more
awkward result for desert theorists who emphasize the responsibility of
people in choosing to engage in more or less productive activities.

Most contemporary versions of the principles discussed so far allow
some role for the market as a means of achieving the desired
distributive pattern — the Difference Principle uses it as a
means of helping the least advantaged; utilitarian principles commonly
use it as a means of achieving the distributive pattern maximizing
utility; desert-based principles rely on it to distribute goods
according to desert, etc. In contrast, advocates of libertarian
distributive principles rarely see the market as a means to some
desired pattern, since the principle(s) they advocate do not
ostensibly propose a ‘pattern’ at all, but instead
describe the sorts of acquisitions or exchanges which are just in
their own right. The market will be just, not as a means to some
pattern, but insofar as the exchanges permitted in the market satisfy
the conditions of just acquisition and exchange described by the
principles. For libertarians, just outcomes are those arrived at by
the separate just actions of individuals; a particular distributive
pattern is not required for justice. Robert Nozick has advanced this
version of libertarianism (Nozick 1974), and is its best known
contemporary advocate.

Nozick proposes a 3-part “Entitlement Theory”.

If the world were wholly just, the following
definition would exhaustively cover the subject of justice in holdings:

A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of
justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.

A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of
justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is
entitled to the holding.

No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications
of (a) and (b).

The complete principle of distributive justice would say simply that a
distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they
possess under the distribution (Nozick, p.151).

The statement of the Entitlement Theory includes reference to the
principles of justice in acquisition and transfer. (For details of
these principles see Nozick, pp.149–182.) The principle of justice in
transfer is the least controversial and is designed to specify fair
contracts while ruling out stealing, fraud, etc. The principle of
justice in acquisition is more complicated and more controversial. The
principle is meant to govern the gaining of exclusive property rights
over the material world. For the justification of these rights, Nozick
takes his inspiration from John Locke's idea that everyone
‘owns’ themselves and, by mixing one's labors with the
world, self-ownership can generate ownership of some part of the
material world. However, of Locke's mixing metaphor, Nozick
legitimately asks: ‘...why isn't mixing what I own with what I
don't own a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what
I don't? If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so its
molecules... mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own
the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?’ (Nozick
1974, p.174) Nozick concludes that what is significant about mixing our
labor with the material world is that in doing so, we tend to increase
the value of it, so that self-ownership can lead to ownership of the
external world in such cases (Nozick 1974, pp. 149–182).

The obvious objection to this claim is that it is not clear why the
first people to acquire some part of the material world should be able
to exclude others from it (and, for instance, be the land owners while
the later ones become the wage laborers). In response to this
objection, Nozick follows Locke in recognizing the need for a
qualification on just acquisition. According to the
Lockean Proviso, an exclusive acquisition of the external
world is just, if, after the acquisition, there is ‘enough and
as good left in common for others’. One of the main challenges
for libertarians has been to formulate a morally plausible
interpretation of this proviso. According to Nozick's weaker version
of Locke's Proviso, “a process normally giving rise to a
permanent bequeathable property right in a previously unowned thing
will not do so if the position of others no longer at liberty to use
the thing is thereby worsened” (Nozick, 1974, p. 178). For
Nozick's critics, his proviso is unacceptably weak. This is because it
fails to consider the position others may have achieved under
alternative distributions and thereby instantiates the morally dubious
criterion of whoever is first gets the exclusive spoils. For example,
one can satisfy Nozick's proviso by ‘acquiring’ a beach
and charging $1 admission to those who previously were able to use the
beach for free, so long as one compensates them with a benefit they
deem equally valuable, such as a clean-up or life-guarding service on
the beach. However, the beach-goers would have been even better off
had the more efficient organizer among them acquired the beach,
charging only 50 cents for the same service, but this alternative is
never considered under Nozick's proviso (Cohen, 1995).

Will Kymlicka has given a summary of the steps in Nozick's
self-ownership argument:

People own themselves.

The world is initially unowned.

You can acquire absolute rights over a disproportionate share of
the world, if you do not worsen the condition of others.

It is relatively easy, without worsening the condition of others,
to acquire absolute rights over a disproportionate share of the
world. Therefore:

Once private property has been appropriated, a free market in
capital and labor is morally required (Kymlicka 1990, p. 112).

The assessment of this argument is quite complex, but the difficulties
mentioned above with the proviso call into question claims (3)
and (4).

The challenge for libertarians then is to find a plausible reading
of (3) which will yield (4). Moreover, Nozick extends the operation of the
proviso to apply both to acquisitions and transfers, compounding the
problem,(Nozick, 1974, p. 174).

Of course, many existing holdings are the result of acquisitions or
transfers which at some point did not satisfy the principles of
justice for acquisitions or transfers. Hence, Nozick must supplement
those principles with a principle of rectification for past
injustice. Although he does not specify this principle he does
describe its purpose:

This principle uses historical information about previous
situations and injustices done in them... and information about the
actual course of events that flowed from these injustices, until the
present, and it yields a description (or descriptions) of holdings in
the society. The principle of rectification presumably will make use of
its best estimate of subjunctive information about what would have
occurred... if the injustice had not taken place. If the actual
description of holdings turns out not to be one of the descriptions
yielded by the principle, then one of the descriptions yielded must be
realized. (Nozick 1974, pp. 152–153)

Nozick does not make an attempt to provide a principle of
rectification. The absence of such a principle is much worse for a
historical theory than for a patterned theory. Past injustices
systematically undermine the justice of every subsequent distribution
in historical theories. Nozick is clear that his historical theory
cannot be used to evaluate the justice of actual societies until such
a theory of rectification is given or no considerations of
rectification of injustice could apply to justify the distribution in
the actual society:

In the absence of [a full treatment of the principle of
rectification] applied to a particular society, one cannot use
the analysis and theory presented here to condemn any particular scheme
of transfer payments, unless it is clear that no considerations of
rectification of injustice could apply to justify it. (Nozick 1974,
p.231)

Unfortunately for the theory, it would seem that no such treatment
will ever be forthcoming because the task is, for all practical
purposes, impossible. The numbers of injustices perpetrated throughout
history, both within nations and between them, are enormous and the
necessary details of the vast majority of injustices are
unavailable. Even if the details of the injustices were available, the
counterfactual causal chains could not be reliably determined. As
Derek Parfit has pointed out, in a different context, even the people
who would have been born would have been different (Parfit 1986). As a
consequence, it is difficult to see how Nozick's entitlement theory
could provide guidance as to what the current distribution of material
holdings should be or what distributions or redistributions are
legitimate or illegitimate. (Indeed Nozick suggests, for instance,
the Difference Principle may be the best implementation of the
principle of rectification.) Although Nozick is fairly candid about
this consequence, many of his supporters and critics have ignored it
and have carried on a vigorous debate as though, contrary to Nozick's
own statement, his theory can be used to evaluate the justice of
current economic distributions.

Libertarians usually advocate a system in which
there are exclusive property rights, with the role of the government
restricted to the protection of these property rights. The property
rights commonly rule out taxation for purposes other than raising the
funds necessary to protect property rights. One of the strongest critiques of
any attempt to institute such a system of legally protected strong property
rights comes, as we have seen, from Nozick's theory itself —
there seems no obvious reason to give strong legal protection to
property rights which have arisen through violations of the just
principles of acquisition and transfer. But putting this critique to
one side for a moment, what other arguments are made in favor of
exclusionary property rights?

As already noted, Nozick argues that because people own themselves and
hence their talents, they own whatever they can produce with these
talents. Moreover, it is possible in a free market to sell the
products of exercising one's talents. Any taxation of the income from
such selling, according to Nozick, ‘institute[s] (partial)
ownership by others of people and their actions and labor’
(Nozick, p. 172). People, according to this argument, have these
exclusive rights of ownership. Taxation then, simply involves
violating these rights and allowing some people to own (partially)
other people. Moreover, it is argued, any system not legally
recognizing these rights violates Kant's maxim to treat people always
as ends in themselves and never merely as a means. The two main
difficulties with this argument have been: (1) to show that
self-ownership is only compatible with having such strong exclusive
property rights; and (2) that a system of exclusive property rights is
the best system for treating people with respect, as ends in
themselves.

Nozick candidly accepts that he does not himself give a systematic
moral justification of the exclusionary property rights he advocates:
‘This book does not present a precise theory of the moral basis
of individual rights.’ (Nozick, p.xiv) But others have tried to
provide more systematic justifications of similar rights (Lomasky,
Steiner) or to develop, more fully, justifications to which Nozick
alludes.

In addition to the arguments from self-ownership, and the
requirement to treat people as ends in themselves, the most common
other route for trying to justify exclusive property rights has been to
argue that they are required for the maximization of freedom and/or
liberty or the minimization of violations of these (Hayek 1960). As an
empirical claim though, this appears to be false. If we compare
countries with less exclusionary property rights (e.g. more taxation)
with countries with more exclusionary property regimes, we see no
systematic advantage in freedoms/liberties enjoyed by people in the
latter countries. (Of course, we do see a difference in
distribution of such freedoms/liberties in the latter countries, the
richer have more and the poorer less, while in the former they are more
evenly distributed.) Now if libertarians restrict what counts as a
valuable freedom/liberty (and discount other freedoms/liberties people
value), it will follow that exclusionary property rights are required
to maximize freedom/liberty or to minimize violations of these. But the
challenge for these libertarians is to show why only their favored
liberties and freedoms are valuable, and not those which are weakened
by a system of exclusive property rights.

There is no one feminist conception of distributive justice;
theorists who name themselves feminists defend positions across the
political spectrum. Hence, feminists offer distinctive versions of all
the theories considered so far as well as others. One way of thinking
about what unifies many feminist theorists is an interest in what
difference, if any, the practical experience of gender makes to the
subject matter or study of justice; how different feminists answer this
question distinguishes them from each other and from those alternative
distributive principles that most inspire their thinking.

The distributive principles so far outlined, with the exception of
strict egalitarianism, are often described as falling under the broad
classification of liberalism — they both inform, and are the
product of, the liberal democracies which have emerged over the last
two centuries. Lumping them together this way, though clumsy, makes
the task of understanding the emergence of feminist critiques (and the
subsequent positive theories) much easier.

John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women (1869) gives
one of the clearest early feminist critiques of the political and
distributive structures of the emerging liberal democracies. His
writings provide the starting point for many contemporary liberal
feminists. Mill argued that the principles associated with the
developing liberalism of his time required equal political status for
women. The principles Mill explicitly mentions include a rejection of
the aristocracy of birth, equal opportunity in education and in the
marketplace, equal rights to hold property, a rejection of the man as
the legal head of the household, and equal rights to political
participation. Feminists who follow Mill believe that a proper
recognition of the position of women in society requires that women be
given equal and the same rights as men have, and that these primarily
protect their liberty and their status as equal persons under the law.
Thus, government regulation should not prevent women from competing on
equal terms with men in educational, professional, marketplace and
political institutions. From the point of view of other feminisms, the
liberal feminist position is a conservative one, in the sense that it
requires the proper inclusion for women of the rights, protections, and
opportunities previously secured for men, rather than a fundamental
change to the traditional liberal position. The problem for women, on
this view, is not liberalism but the failure of society and the State
to properly instantiate liberal principles.

One phrase or motto around which a whole range of feminists have
rallied, however, marks a significant break with Mill's liberalism:
‘the personal is political.’ Feminists have offered a
variety of interpretations of this motto, many of which take the form
of a critique of liberal theories. Mill was crucial in developing the
liberal doctrine of limiting the state's intervention in the private
lives of citizens. Many contemporary feminists have argued that the
resulting liberal theories of justice have fundamentally been unable to
accommodate the injustices that have their origins in this
‘protected’ private sphere. This particular feminist
critique has also been a primary source of inspiration for the broader
multicultural critique of liberalism. The liberal commitments to
government neutrality and to a protected personal sphere of liberty,
where the government must not interfere, have been primary critical
targets.

While issues about neutrality and personal liberty go beyond debates
about distributive justice they also have application within these
debates. The feminist critics recognize that liberalism correctly
identifies the government as one potential source of oppression against
individuals, and therefore recommends powerful political protections of
individual liberty. They argue, however, that liberal theories of
distributive justice are unable to address the oppression which
surfaces in the so-called private sphere of government
non-interference. Susan Moller Okin, for example, documents the effects
of the institution of the nuclear family, arguing that the consequence
of this institution is a position of systematic material and political
inequality for women. Standard liberal theories, committed to
neutrality in the private sphere, seem powerless to address (or
sometimes even recognize) striking and lasting inequalities for women,
minorities, or historically oppressed racial groups, when these are
merely the cumulative effect of individuals' free behavior. Okin and
others demonstrate, for example, that women have substantial
disadvantages in competing in the market because of childrearing
responsibilities which are not equally shared with men. As a
consequence, any theory relying on market mechanisms, including most
liberal theories, will yield systems which result in women
systematically having less income and wealth than men. Thus, feminists
have challenged contemporary political theorists to rethink the
boundaries of political authority in the name of securing a just
outcome for women and other historically oppressed groups.

While the political effects of personal freedom pose a serious
challenge to contemporary liberal theories of distributive justice, the
feminist critiques are somewhat puzzling because, as Jean Hampton puts
it, many feminists appear to complain in the name of liberal values. In
other words, their claims about the fundamental flaws of liberalism at
the same time leave in tact the various ideals of liberty and equality
which inspire the liberal theories of justice. Moreover, the task of
defining feasible pathways for modifying the structure of liberal
democracies without undermining their virtues and protections has
proved more difficult than setting out the criticisms of
liberalism. Indeed, despite a legitimate feminist worry about the
effects of so-called government neutrality on women's material status,
the relative neutrality of liberal democracies compared to non-liberal
societies has been one of the significant contributing factors both to
the flourishing of feminist theory and to the many significant
practical gains women in liberal democracies have made relative to
women in other parts of the world. The challenge, being taken up by
many, is to navigate both a coherent theoretical and practical path in
response to the best feminist critiques available (see the entry on
feminist ethics).

How are we to go about choosing between the different distributive
principles on offer, and respond to criticisms of the principles?
Unfortunately, few philosophers explicitly discuss the methodology
they are using. The most notable exception is John Rawls (1971, 1974)
who explicitly brought the method of wide reflective equilibrium to
political philosophy. This method has been brilliantly discussed by
Norman Daniels over the years and the reader is strongly encouraged to
refer to his entry (see
reflective equilibrium)
to understand how to evaluate, revise and choose between normative
principles. While there is no point in reiterating the method here
there are some supplementary issues worth noting.

Empirical data on the beliefs of the population about distributive
justice was not available when Rawls published A Theory of
Justice (Rawls 1971) but much empirical work has since been
completed. Swift (1995, 1999) and Miller (1999, chaps. 3–4) have
provided surveys of this literature and arguments for why those
committed to the method of reflective equilibrium in distributive
justice should take the beliefs of the population
seriously, though not uncritically. Indeed, some go even further,
arguing that the distributive decisions arising through the legitimate
application of particular democratic processes might even, at least in
part, constitute distributive justice (Walzer 1984). Data on people's
beliefs about distributive justice is also useful for addressing the
necessary intersection between philosophical and political
processes. Such beliefs put constraints on what institutional and
policy reforms are practically achievable in any generation —
especially when the society is committed to democratic processes.

Two final methodological issues need to be noted. The first concerns
the distinctive role counterexamples play in debates about
distributive justice. As noted above, the overarching methodological
concern of the distributive justice literature must be, in the first
instance, the pressing choice of how the benefits and burdens of
economic activity should be distributed, rather than the mere
uncovering of abstract truth. Principles are to be implemented in real
societies with the problems and constraints inherent in such
application. Given this, pointing out that the application of any
particular principle will have some, perhaps many, immoral results
will not by itself constitute a fatal counterexample to any
distributive theory. Such counter-evidence to a theory would only be
fatal if there were an alternative, or improved, version of the
theory, which, if fully implemented, would yield a morally preferable
society overall. So, it is at least possible that the best
distributive theory, when implemented, might yield a system which
still has many injustices and/or negative consequences. This practical
aspect partly distinguishes the role of counterexamples in
distributive justice theory from many other philosophical areas. Given
that distributive justice is about what to do now, not just what to
think, alternate distributive theories must, in part, compete as
comprehensive systems which take into account the practical
constraints we face.

The second and related methodological point is that the evaluation of
alternate distributive principles requires us (and their advocates) to
consider the application of the distributive principle in the
world. If it is uncertain or indeterminate how a particular
distributive principle might in practice apply to the ordering of real
societies, then this principle is not yet a serious candidate for our
consideration. This is also true of principles whose implementation is
practically impossible given the
institutional/psychological/informational/administrative/technical constraints of a
society. Distributive justice is not an area where we can say an idea
is good in theory but not in practice. If it is not good in practice,
then it is not good in theory either.

Swift, Adam, 1999, “Public Opinion and Political Philosophy: The
relation between social-scientific and philosophical analyses of
distributive justice,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice: An
International Forum, 2: 337–363 .

Swift, Adam, and Gordon Marshall, Carole Burgoyne, and David
Routh, 1995, “Distributive justice: Does it matter what the
people think?,” in Social Justice and Political
Change., D. Mason, J. Kluegel and B. Wegener (eds.), New York:
Aldine De Gruyter, 15–47 .

Current Issues in Distributive Justive

Center For Economic And Social Justice
This site promotes a new paradigm of economics
and development, the “just third way”. Provides links to
numerous organisations, reports, articles and statistical data which
support its paradigm.

Centre for Independent Studies (CIS)
The CIS offers an Australian perspective
on libertarian distributive justice, with its purpose to promote a
market economy with high growth, an open society, individual freedom
and small government in Australia.

Communist Party of Australia (CPA)
Official website of CPA Australia. An alternative
approach to current social policy issues within Australia promoting
Communist Theory.

Crossroads Community Fund
Crossroads was established in 1979 as a response to
increasing social problems regarding the distribution of wealth, power
and resources in Chicago, USA. This organisation attempts to address
the institutional barriers that prevent people from enjoying freedom in
their lives and attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of institutional
changes to increase freedom.

Guild Law Centre for Economic and Social Justice
A non-profit law centre which
provides advocacy, representation, legal education and technical
support to empower communities, worker rights groups and individuals
seeking systemic change toward economic and social justice.

Heritage Foundation
A research and educational institution in the United
States, whose stated purpose is to formulate and promote libertarian public
policies based on principles of free enterprise, limited government,
individual freedom, and a strong national defence.

Political Research Associates Home Page
A non-profit organisation committed
to establishing a democratic society based on progressive values and
encouraging a pluralistic society. The website enables various
activists to voice their opinion about the injustices of American
society and supports research projects for developing ideas and
informing the general public.

Project for a New American Century
Organisation in the USA that promotes
conservative policy issues, encouraging an increase in America's
defence, and American involvement in international and global
issues.

People in Distributive Justice

Marxists Internet Archive
A website for Marxist theory, including the history of
Marxist thought, writings on Marxism, and a format for questions and
debates.

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from 1997 to 2007.
Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to neh50@neh.gov.